Quick tip: maiden names
10 July 2013 by 1 Comment
In official records in the Netherlands, women are usually referred to by their maiden names. This makes it much easier to find them. When looking for a record, try searching for both last names of the spouses or parents. Chances are this will quickly return several records that are relevant for the family you’re researching.
In fact, as I understand it, a woman’s surname does not legally change upon marriage, which might explain why one finds the maiden name in all sorts of records. In fact, yesterday I even found a marriage registration that included not only the bride’s parents full names (including maiden names), but all four of her grandparents as well.
This makes Dutch genealogy much much easier than cultures in which the woman takes on the husband’s surname at marriage. Even worse is the tradition of referring to the woman by her husband’s full name (e.g. “Mrs. John Smith”). Not only is that inherently sexist, it makes identifying the female line terribly difficult. I have lengthy detailed obituaries of female relatives in which they are named only by their husband’s name yet, ironically, give detailed information about everyone else’s names (i.e. full and maiden names of the deceased’s daughters, sisters, mother, etc.).
The only major disparity I’ve noticed in Dutch records is that in birth records, they’ll give the father’s age as of the date of the birth of a child, but not the mother’s.